Looking for God in all the wrong places

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, afterlife

I really like Mary Roach. I have read her columns in a couple of venues, most recently in the Reader's Digest. She has her own, refreshing take on almost anything. It is no surprise to me that she would straightforwardly dive right in where angels (or at least, most of the rest of us) fear to tread: is there any overlap between science and faith? In particular, she asks, can science have anything to say about "what happens after we die?" Her book Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife is the fruit of her year-long trek through the back roads of a "search for the soul".

Scientists and Religionists are today about a deeply polarized as ever, and proponents from both sides tend to say that religious things are a priori untenable subjects for science. I was taught at one time that things of faith offered "subjective proof" only to the faithful; we could know within ourselves, but no spectrograph or microscope would detect anything. Ms Roach is not the first to say, "Is that really true?", but she is probably the most thorough.

She investigated reincarnation in India, focusing on the work of a few who collect reports by children about past lives they remember. She dug out the records of those who tried to weigh the soul, by putting moribund persons on sensitive scales, and recording sudden changes in weight that might occur at the time of death. She brings out fascinating material—quite literally—presented by Spiritualists of the 19th Century who were quite compulsive in their attempts to objectively prove that the souls of the "dearly departed" were available and eager to communicate. She attended a school for Mediums, tinkered with various gadgets that have been used to record or measure spirit voices or influences.

She came close to hitting pay dirt when she encountered some folks who record and study infrasound. No ghosts, but a possible explanation for the ghostly feelings people get in "haunted" locales. Among land animals, elephants and rhinos have recently been reported to communicate over long distance using frequencies below 20Hz (20 cycles per second), sounds humans can't hear, but which we can feel if they are strong enough, like the bass beat at a rock concert. It is less well known that lions and tigers also use infrasound, and that the after-rumble of a tiger roar is quite strong. Some people, but not all, get fearful or tearful when they hear tigers roaring, or similar strong sounds. This makes sense; it is useful to know tigers are in the vicinity!

Finally, the author reports on medical people who are doing their best to follow up on Ray Moody's 1975 book, Life After Life, about near-death experiences, or NDEs. They keep a computer screen, pointed upward, near the ceiling of their operating room, with a timed sequence of images shown. When someone reports they "floated to the ceiling," the researchers can ask what was on the screen, and learn if out-of-body consciousness has genuine senses.

Death is our biggest question, and Faith our most coherent response. Is any faith true? Can any claims made by any body of Scripture be subject to experiment? My own faith has this to say, based on the Christian Bible:

• A person has a body, a soul, and a spirit.
• The body deals with physical (somatic) things, the soul with psychological things (feelings, decisions, thoughts), and the spirit with spiritual things (fellowship, conscience, prophetic knowledge).
• The Holy Spirit deals only with the human spirit, except in rare instances we call miracles.

From this we draw certain conclusions:

• The things of the spirit are interpreted by the soul.
• The soul controls the body, in part.
• The only known "instrument" of spiritual things is the human soul, acting through the human body.

I suppose some kind of EEG might detect the soul's activity in changing brain waves. But it isn't certain, to a Christian at least, whether there is more to the soul than brain activity. In fact, the Body-Mind theories of some psychologists claim that the mind's activity includes endocrine and other glands throughout the body, so that the soul requires all the body. There is so much we still don't know!

But the Bible also has this to say:

• We die but once, then await judgment.
• After death, the spirit+soul, the disembodied person, is held in Sheol (Hebrew) or Hades (Greek) awaiting resurrection.
• The saved and the lost are held separately, but have not yet received final judgment; that will occur after resurrection.
• The saved can enter heaven after resurrection, when they receive a "spiritual body."

There is a lot more, but the scope of Mary Roach's study was a lot closer in than any promise of resurrection or judgment, it was just, what's happening now. I tend to think that God, being as Isaiah said of Him, "a God who hides himself," does not submit the Spirit to instrumentation.